[mythtv-users] 2 questions - Running out of disk space and transcoding

[Phill Edwards]

> Running Myth .17
> Athlon xp2200
> 512mb of ram
> Hauppauge v4l card
> 40gb hard drive
> nvidia gforce 4
> 
> 1. I keep running out of disk space and am unable to record anything
> new. Even if i delete ALL recordings, I am still out of space. I must
> manually delete several .nuv files from my drive. Once deleted, I must
> stop and start mythbackend in order for myth to see the free space. I
> have searched the threads and see several discussions about this issue
> but no fixes that I can understand. I am not a coder and only a Linux
> beginner.
> 
> Since i have a 40gb drive i am repeating this process several times a week.
> 
> anyone have a fix that a newbie could perform?

That's odd. The thread called "Mythbackend keeping files open, disk
space not being freed" implies that this was fixed in CVS in 0.16 so
should be fixed in your 0.17 version. This is the exact problem you're
talking about.

Maybe a workaround would be to check if any important backend progs
are running and if not do a restart via a regular cron job. Messy but
may help as a stop-gap. You could do something like, which I borrowed
from someone else to do a pre-shutdown check:

!/bin/sh
COMMFLAG=`ps -e | grep mythcommflag | grep -v grep | wc -l | awk '{print $1}'`
TRANSCODE=`ps -e | grep mythtranscode | grep -v grep | wc -l | awk '{print $1}'`
TV_GRAB=`ps -e | grep tv_grab_au.sh | grep -v grep | wc -l | awk '{print $1}'`

if [ $COMMFLAG -eq 0 ] && [ $TRANSCODE -eq 0 ] && [ $TV_GRAB -eq 0 ]
then
       service mythbackend restart
       exit 0
else
       echo "`date +%F\ \%T` Something's running, restart disallowed"
>> /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log
       exit 1
fi


BIG WARNING - this doesn't check if something's recording at the time
so you'll have to figure out how to check for that yourself. I think
someone may have posted something to this list in the last few days
that uses fuser and /dev/video (from my memory) to see if something's
recording.

Regards,
Phill